Tuesday, October 17, 2017

There was a hurricane called Ophelia off the coast of Ireland but here the weather was strangely summery. We opened all the windows and the Dutch people fried pork.

Two people are dead, one was Lidia Dragescu (23, jumped off the Whispering Gallery at St.Paul’s cathedral). She was from Romania but lived in London. She caught the bus to the cathedral. The Times reported that she‘fell’ which she did but she fell because she climbed over the balustrade and jumped off. Her suicide note said,“I am doing this for me, to escape. All of the past and the present it makes my head heavy.”

The other was Sean Hughes (51, cirrhosis of the liver) who I only knew vaguely from TV. He was a funny/sad man. When his father died he gave up drinking. In an interview he said about this :“The idea of not drinking five years ago would have been alien to me. I was blocking things out with drink. You realise that when you’re dealing with a death you can’t block it out. But you have to come to all these places on your own. Once you realise that, you become a more rounded person.”